14-04: Linking growth on lignocellulosic carbon sources to gene expression through secretome and transcriptome analysis in novel enzyme producing filamentous fungi from Vietnamese habitats

The synthesis of biofuels and biochemicals is still challenged by the difficulties to cost efficiently degrade lignocellulosic material to fermentable sugars or to isolate the intact polymers. Biomass degrading and modifying enzymes play an integral role both in the separation of the polymers from the wood network in nature, as well as in their subsequent modification, prior to further process and product development. To fully utilize the potential of enzymes in different application, novel enzymes that have the combined properties of thermotolerance, pH range of activity, substrate specificity and solvent tolerance to suit the intended application, still need to be discovered.

We took advantage of the rapidly evolving and high biodiversity in Vietnamese ecosystem and have been screening various isolates for their cellulases and hemicellulases activities. Promising strains were then cultivated with different lignocellulosic carbon sources, such as wheat bran, spruce and avicel and their biomass degrading capacity was analysed through cross species protein identification of their secretome determined by iTRAQ. Using next generation sequencing of the total transcriptome from the cultivations of these unsequenced filamentous fungi, we studied the expression of relevant genes as a function of time of cultivation and the different carbon sources. Interesting transcripts will in next step be used to heterologously clone and express the respective genes and identify their role in the degradation process.